John Newton's thoughts, ideas and opinions on content management, enterprise software and open source.

2007.04.24

When Collaboration is an Emergency

Tsunami, Earthquake, Hurricane, Flood - everyone’s nightmare disaster can also create the biggest challenges in collaboration and employing information technology. The same Communications of the ACM that had the 7 Habits article had a whole series of articles on Emergency Management Systems. Surprisingly, the techniques that are required to cope with the flood of information in case of disaster don’t seem all that different from those required by business today. The Indonesian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina taught the whole planet about the need to invest in preparedness and reaction capabilities regardless of how poor or how rich we are.

One article I found particularly interesting was The Human and Computer as a Team in Emergency Management Information Systems. In fact, nothing in this article seemed to be limited what is required in a disaster, but what is necessary for coping with daily business pressure and information overload. The primary process of coping with a disaster is Build the Picture, Understand the Picture, and Change the Picture in a Goal-Oriented Fashion. Sounds like good business strategy to me.

The article talks about the people who are involved in the command, control, and analysis for emergencies that are built on trust of others who also are working in 14-24 hour shifts knowing that mistakes can cost lives and immediate action is essential. As if describing the persona in a use case, these workers:

Feel they are exercising control

Have total focus on the problem at hand and ignore all that is not relevant

Improvise with unconventional solutions to appraise information and formulate decisions

Enjoy the challenge and curiosity of the effort

Are highly motivated due to the critical nature of the problem

This sounds like a typical Silicon Valley start-up or anyone else in a highly competitive field where people enjoy what they are doing. The design of the emergency response system then creates challenges that are not a typical of other collaborative systems in a highly reactive environment:

Obtain accurate and timely perceptions of reality through communication structures that track and facilitate open exchange of information

Enhance focus without interruption and require minimum effort to carry out a task

Encourage creativity and improvisation of both the individual and the team

In disaster management systems under development, the emergency manager has the following tools at hand:

Decision support and modeling tools - impact analysis and support for decision execution

Representation of a common operating picture - visualization of what is happening and where resources are open to everyone

Wouldn’t it be great to have a system like this in any business? It requires a good understanding though of the participation of the people and computers. What is each good at and what is each bad at? People are good at:

Perceiving patterns

Improvising flexible procedures

Exercising judgment

Inductive reasoning

Detecting small changes by sight and sound

Storing large amounts of information for long periods of time and recalling facts at the right time

Machines are good at:

Responding quickly to control signals

Applying great force smoothly and precisely (like landing a 747)

Repetitive, routine tasks such as monitoring

Handling highly complex operations and multi-tasking

Deductive reasoning and computation

Storing information briefly

In other articles, there were extending these systems to use community participation using open source and mashup to collect information not just from officials but the public at large. Those that were prepared for the Tsunami were often ready because they were alerted by mobile phones. The internet can also play an important role in collecting intelligence. After all, the internet was originally designed to withstand thermo-nuclear war and breakdowns in individual communication links. Here are some examples of mashups for accessing and collecting information:

Automation and collaboration have a role in emergency management. Just as triage methods were invented in time of war and moved on to ordinary civil use, emergency systems can probably help teach us what is important in collaboration and process automation. The primary lesson that the Human and Computer as a Team article conveys is that we ignore the human role at our peril and that the computer supports people and helps build trust between people by increasing trust in the information that they are sharing.

Comments

It was very interesting to read this post and especially to study the image. I recognize a lot of this from the discussions I have had both within Sweden's Network Based Defense initative as well as in the multinational arena where the JFCOM-led experimentation series more or less deal with the exact same issues. What started out as a mainly military approach have now broadend into a civil-military coordination effort supposed to reflect the current needs in crisis response operations. To me the main challenge is to bridge knowledge and technology from "old" military domains such as radar systems, GIS-systems etc. with "civilian" concepts/technology such as ECM, search technologies, BI, collaborations technologies and ERP...